People absorb information passively. Humans can, of course, intently study; but few can fully switch off passive learning. This gives advertising incredible power over people they do not recognize.
I vividly remember a multi-month period in my childhood when headlines about Tylenol overdoses dominated the nightly news. I also remember Aleve’s commercial saying, “Just two Aleve can stop the pain all day – it would take eight Tylenol to do that.” I was a child, but I’ve always held the Aleve commercials contributed to the Tylenol overdoses.
House Keeping
This article was written for broad syndication, along with links to my other recent work. I’m also linking to some interesting things I’ve been reading as I believe doing so makes the internet less platform dependent.
Recent Articles
BuzzFeed News And Twitter Blues
To greatly paraphrase Tolstoy, you can explain anything to a complete ding dong if they know nothing about the topic, but you’ll fail to explain it to the greatest minds if they start with any preconceptions. Cognitive bias is powerful. People will pay more for a worse product if they think the brand is better.
Elon Musk was able to do in months what BuzzFeed News couldn’t do in years; completely eradicate prior brand perceptions. Making the blue checks a clear transaction that everyone understands scrubbed away the patina. Doing away with the legacy checkmarks took away the last bits of aureole for the symbol.
Capital: Spent, Deployed, Made Up
Dear Startup Folks,
Most of you live in a fantasy land, where numbers are not real and, therefore may be anything you want. This comes up across every situation; a founder believes the total addressable market is the entire population of the earth, or that the conversion rate will be an easy-to-calculate 5%, or that ad spending scales perfectly across budgets, leaving no change in efficiency between $100, and $100 million. This is all nonsense, but it is at least such unrefined nonsense that everyone knows the speaker is diluted.
A 4/20 Corporate Message
This 4/20 remember that surplus shareholder value is the reason for the season. You can have a lot of fun working, ideally from an office. As a company we like offices as our share holders and specifically our board members own a lot of commercial real-estate. Also because people like you want the perception of potential for career advancement and most low, and middle management roles are unneeded in a fully remote environment.
Back To The Story
My dad was, and presumably still is, an idiot. Growing up, I remember him asking for eight Tylenol on multiple occasions. I promise eight was not an arbitrary number, and it was not a dosage suggested by any healthcare worker.
The Aleve commercial was setting a dosage of eight pills for a competitor in the minds of consumers. The intention of highlighting how much more effective its active ingredient, naproxen, was for pain relief than acetaminophen (Tylenol’s active ingredient) had unintended consequences. That’s my opinion based on memory and anecdote.
As I’ve written several times, finding something online from over 20 years ago is incredibly hard. Looking for the Aleve ads with the Tylenol dosage-specific comparative claims is interesting. I discovered lawsuits, statements from The National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau, and a few pharmaceutical associations critical of the comparative aspect of these ads.
The ads wanted to sell more Aleve, but people were dumb, so some took more Tylenol instead. I don’t believe my dad could have explained that he wanted to take eight pills because he saw a competitor’s commercial dozens of times. Such is how humans passively consume and assimilate information in their brains.
Advertising Is Simplified, Catchy, And Repetitive
Most people believe fresh beef is substantially better than frozen. It’s true, but probably not to the level, many people think. The scientific studies on the effects of freezing meat on objective and subjective measurements find that most people don’t notice a major difference in quality from short-term freezing.
Wendy’s has spent hundreds of millions advertising “fresh, never frozen beef.” That line frames Wendy’s beef as better than competitors’ products. Freeh never frozen is easy to explain and remember, but it’s a very small part of the story of meat quality.
Wendy’s uses better quality meat than most fast-food competitors. But explaining USDA ratings and different meat cuts is neither simple nor catchy. So the ads say “fresh, never frozen,” and consumers fill in the blanks.
I think “fresh, never frozen” is an amazing marketing phrase for Wendy’s. But most of the time, taglines, slogans, and repeated phrases work because of the repetition and not brilliance by marketers and copywriters. “Be Really Refreshed,” “Real Magic,” and “Look Up America” are slogans Coca-Cola has used over the years.
Coca-Cola has a list of every slogan the company used, and my preference aside, each of those 73 slogans could be interchanged. The success of mass-market advertising is 12% inspiration, 6% luck, 3% not being stupid, and 79% reach and frequency. If an ad for a consumer product isn’t horrible, millions of brand impressions will drive sales.
As consumers see the same ads repeatedly, they absorb that information passively. Rarely will people pay attention to ads, but the ads have an impact. The slight idea that 4 grams of Tylenol is a dose, or a deep belief that fresh beef is much better than frozen ads, crawl into our brains.
Bookmarks
Like many I used social sites, mostly as a means of amplifying, and saving interesting articles and videos. After my unofficial banishment from Twitter I added a section on my personal site where I keep bookmarks and notes for the same function. These are the direct links to a handful of the articles I took note of this week.
- Disney sues Ron DeSantis on First Amendment grounds (Scott Nover / Quartz)
- Journalists fear Texas Legislature could weaken law designed to protect free speech (Matthew Watkins / The Texas Tribune) [My take on all this]
- Fox News ousts Tucker Carlson, its most popular host (David Bauder / The Associated Press)
- Your Messaging Service Should Not Be a DEA Informant (Mario Trujillo / Electronic Frontier Foundation)
- Why Silicon Valley is bringing eugenics back (Paris Marx / Disconnect)
- Montana Governor Somehow (Accidentally?) Manages to Make TikTok Ban Bill Even Dumber (Ari Cohn / Platforms & Polemics )
Social
Substack – Tumblr –Mastodon – Post News
Podcast (audio articles)
I’ve been adapting more of my articles as podcasts for accessibility and ease of consumption. These are available in most of the normal places.
Apple Podcasts –Spotify – Google Podcasts – Stitcher
Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on April 27, 2023. Photo “TV Wall” / CC BY-NC 2.0.